Coffee percolates into culinary art

Mar. 26, 2014
|

Staff from Cafe Grumpy of New York, N.Y. create drinks and serve customers as if they're at a real coffee shop instead of a coffee trade show. The cafe won first place in the America's Best Coffeehouse competition at Coffee Fest NY March 7-9, 2014. / Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press

by Amy Sowder, Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press

by Amy Sowder, Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press

NEW YORK -- Under his bedazzled Ed Hardy baseball cap and shaggy bangs, Wei-Cheng Hsieh glued his eyes to the nutty espresso palette balanced within a brown mug in his left hand.

The barista bent his right wrist just an inch, so the stream of frothed milk could create an intricate tulip pattern.

"So nervous," said Hsieh, 25, after winning the first round. He traveled from Taoyuan City, Taiwan, to compete for his first time in the Coffee Fest NY Latte Art World Championship Open this month. "I just want to do the best latte."

A drinker of five lattes and espressos a day, Hsieh is part of the growing number of baristas and coffee drinkers for whom java is no joke.

Like craft beer, artisanal anything and the Slow Food movement, coffee is becoming more of a culinary experience rather than a generic commodity.

"I like to think of it as the truffle of coffee," said Ken Huynh of Kopi Coffee Co., an Indonesian specialty coffee company with a booth at Coffee Fest NY. He dangled a bag of his rare Kopi Luwak coffee beans, which are ingested, released and collected from the northern Thai palm civet, a weasel-like animal.

Coffee - of all quality levels - is a $30 billion-$32 billion dollar annual industry in the U.S. It's the most popular drink in the world after water and tea.

Eighty-three percent of adults drink coffee in the U.S., the world's biggest consumer of the beverage, up from 78 percent in 2012, according to the National Coffee Association's 2013 online survey.

That's a whole lotta java: an average of three cups a day per person, or 587 million cups.

Even though coffee is so common, coffee aficionados treat their favorite drink like wine, with quality ratings, farm transparency, small batches, flowery flavor descriptions and cupping events similar to wine tastings.

At its Fort Myers and Sanibel Island locations, Bennett's Fresh Roast has lapped up these trends with fervor, particularly that micro-roasting, single-origin philosophy of freshness and flavor.

Most other micro-roasters wait 72 hours to serve their coffee after roasting, but Bennett's hands over steaming mugs no fewer than 24 hours later, using a pressurized de-gassing process, said co-owner Bob Grissinger. Bagged, already-ground coffee sitting on shelves for six months can mildew and get rancid from the bean's oils, he said.

In downtown Naples, Black Bee Coffee has a clientele who specifically seek their direct-trade, organic, single-origin and seasonal coffee beans since they set up their booth last summer at the Third Street South Farmers Market.

Starting by purchasing beans online and roasting them in their oven, Black Bee owners Michael and Lisa McDonnell honed their passion for sourcing high quality, single-origin raw coffee beans from around the globe. Now with a professional roasting machine at home, the McDonnells roast their beans Thursday and Friday nights in small batches.

Through trial and error, the couple discovered Ethiopian Yirgacheffe tastes best at 407 degrees and the Honduras Marcala at 418 degrees to maximize each coffee's inherent character, sweetness, acidity and mouth feel.

The boutique coffee roaster is the new wine connoisseur. And the expert barista is the new sommelier.

To his Coffee Fest NY workshop audience of cafe owners, roasters, importers and farmers, Bruce Milletto of Bellissimo Coffee Advisors explained that having a knowledgeable barista is essential for a successful cafe.

Coffee Fest began in Seattle in 1992 and has been a percolator for industry experts to share innovative ideas, products and education through workshops and exhibitions. The Manhattan show at the Jacob Javits Center marked Coffee Fest's 70th show, and its first complete exhibitor sell-out since 2008.

Coffee fanatics worldwide flocked to the festival and trade show to compete for America's Best Coffeehouse, America's Best Espresso and the Latte Art World Championship, which drew competitors from 28 other countries, including Japan, Australia, Poland, Mexico, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Uzbekistan and Puerto Rico. Cabell Tice, of Thinking Cup in Boston, took the latte prize while New York's Cafe Grumpy was named best coffeehouse.

Staff from Ceremony Coffee Roasters gave away samples using the popular throwback pour-over brewing method. The Annapolis, Md., roaster won America's Best Espresso at the New York event. The company sells to shops nationwide, including Portland, Ore., Seattle, Wash., and Los Angeles - also London.

"It's pretty sweet if people in Portland and Seattle want your coffee," said Ronnie Haas, Ceremony's wholesale director, as he handed out samples of Bolivia Apolo coffee from Franz Tamayo Province, described as honey and Nutella in a cup with a soft pear acidity. Ceremony's coffee is so seasonal, this Apolo will be gone in two months.

"The aftertaste is very well-balanced with vanilla and citrus," Castellanos said. His coffee ranks 85-87 on the Specialty Coffee Association of America rating scale.

A sustainable coffee wave

Discussing aromatics of nougat and notes of chocolate in a particular single-origin coffee bean signals U.S. coffee drinkers are fully immersed in this third wave of the coffee evolution.

Coffee popularity spread from the 1800s, with Folgers and Maxwell House in almost every kitchen cupboard, followed by the second wave's birth of Starbucks in the 1970s and proliferation of coffee shakes, to the third wave's culinary, artisanal, transparent treatment of coffee today.

This third wave is marked by improvements in growing, harvesting and processing, to stronger relationships between coffee growers, traders and roasters, to higher quality and fresh roasting, at times called micro-roasting.

It's also the heyday of specialty coffee, the top percentage in quality representing about 37 percent of U.S. coffee cups, a growing trend trickling from metropolitan areas out to small-town America, said Peter Giuliano, senior director of symposium for the Specialty Coffee of America Association.

He was also co-owner of the Durham, N.C.-based Counter Culture Coffee for 12 years, a name often mentioned in the same breath as Chicago's Intelligentsia, San Francisco's Blue Bottle and Portland's Stumptown. Started in 1995, Counter Culture sustainably sources, roasts and sells to local coffee shops and retail stores alike.

Counter Culture follows the bean from "seed to cup." Sound similar to that whole farm-to-fork/plate/table concept?

"People are discovering coffee as a food, rather than a drug or a generic commodity," Giuliano said, the day after dining with four micro-roasting cafe owners in Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. "We feel more a part of the culinary world."

Foodies are familiar with where their apple was grown and its peak season. In the same way, coffee people are becoming familiar with the farms growing their beans and their harvesting seasons.

Customers are willing to pay for higher quality coffee grown and sold with a conscience, roasters and importers are learning. "There's a lot of money in coffee, and everyone has jumped on that," Bellissimo's Milletto told his workshop crowd.

Coffee can be so experiential and the cafes such a part of the neighborhood, it's replacing the liquor bar, said Lon La Flamme of Dillanos Coffee Roasters, when he took a break from the exhibition.

A Washington-based coffee roaster for almost 20 years, Dillanos specializes in responsible, transparent sourcing and production, including single-origin, organic, microlot, co-op farm coffee.

"The alcohol lounge of yesteryear is the coffee bar of today," La Flamme said.